The question about the very nature of "the Self",
came to the fore from the very beginning of the effort to philosophize
apart
from the teachings of tradition. What was asked for was not a statement
of the ancient religious ideas surviving from the Ancient
Church, but a rational explanation based on experience.
The thing to be explained was the relatively persistent
unity that attaches to the manifold experiences of each individual- a
complex o fexperiences personal to himself and which he calls his Mind.

2. The Early Greeks.

The early Greek thinkers generally sought to explain
the Mind as a finest matter, consisting of one or more elements, such as
the atoms of fire. Later the concept of a universal ordering Mind came
into use.

3. Plato.

Plato regarded the soul or the mind as a partaker
in the "world of ideas" or "prototypes', and as pre-existing and independent
of the body. The mind could thus exert itself as a pure (but individual)
rationality. The soul (mind) was thought of as a changeless entity. (Critics
charge him with regarding it as a passive substance.) Matter took away
reality rather than added to it; so that the mind was the real thing, and
the world but a shadow.

4. Aristotle.

Aristotle spoke of the psyche or soul as the organizing
principle and form of the body of matter. But within the psyche dwells
the "divine" element of man, the Nous or Mind- uncreate, immortal,
the pre-existent substance and subject in us which thinks
and conceives.(1807)

5. Christian Fathers.

Christian ideas followed along the lines of Classical
Greek thought, modified by the materialistic Jewish concepts. The immortal
"spirit" was regarded as a personal conscious entity of "spiritual substance".
As to the psyche and its identity with the immortal spirit, there was considerable
confusion and uncertainty. Usually the Christians believed that the real
life of the spirit released by death was no tresumed until a supposed re-union
with the material body at the ressuection on the "Last Day". Angels and
devils were classed as incorporeal beings of spiritual essence created
before the world of nature.(1808) (See Scholastics.)

6. Descartes.

Descartes ignored the distinction between 'soul'
and 'mind' and defended the idea of spiritual substance as non spatial
and
incorporated and thus as definable only as thought, in contrast with
body and matter which he identified with extension. As to
the "animal spirits", separated from the blood in the brain, he thought
of them as "nothing but material bodies", like particles of
flame.

7. Hume.

The preceding views have all assumed the existence
of a separate substance of the mind, usually defined as a "spiritual
substance". (Spiritual Substance Theory)
But Hume denied that there is any evidence in experience
for supposing that there is any soul or any distinct spiritual substance.
The Mind, he taught, is simply the sum total of man's experiments, which
alone are knowable. (Sensationalism, Associationism, Humism.)

8. Kant.

The resulting current of scepticism was checked by
Immanuel Kant. He pointed out that mind and memoey cannot be broken up
into a number of isolated states. He showed that all experiences were unified
in the individual by an organizing agent,
conceived as judgement.

9. The Humian Tradition.

Hume's philosophy was gradually formed into a trend
of thought which stressed the mind as a sum-total of the mental
processes. These were impersonal, so that it might be said that "it
thinks in the brain" just as we say "it rains outside".
According to the more materialistic thinkers, the
subject
experiencing these processes is the body with its nervous system.
No spiritual bond of unity was recognized. It was claimed that the unity
of personal experiences is not rendered intelligible by
assuming a changeless entity such as Plato and Aristotle considered
the soul to be; for this entity could not link itself on to the
evanescent changing experience so as to bind them into a whole. (This
view is classed as the Actualistic Theory)

10. Behaviorism.

The extreme of the Humian tradition held that mind
is only behavior, that the nervous system is the only ground of unity among
experiences, and that mind is therefore only the body in action, or the
body in response to its environment.

11. The Kantian Tradition.

Following Kant, many philosophers have recognized
that the mind is a deeper permanent reality and that mental phenomena are
the ways of the mind's behavior. The mind is not a mere eddy in
the endless stream of sensations, but with a person acting with will and
intelligence.

12. Personalistic Theory, or Subject Theory.

Thus many found it impossible to identify the ground
of unity among experiences with the neuro-muscular system, as the
Behaviorists do.
We are intelligibly aware of our experiences, and
hus have Consciousness. Experiences actually present as sensations can
be
distinguished form memoey images which are reinstatements of
past experiences. There are different types of knowing; knowing
about, and knowing how. Consciousness, recollection,
and thinking in the sense of reflecting and learning about things, involve
neccessarily a subject which is doing the thinking. Personality
in its various phases - intellect, temperament, skill, and morality-
is the result of a gradual growth.
Few psychologists would go farther and identify
the personality with and immortal soul.

13. Theosophic and Mystical Speculations.

Eclectics, sensing certain values in ancient traditions,
in oriental religious and psychic phenomena, but attaching no authority
to Divine revelation, have spawned a great variety of opinions about the
soul. Some thus hold that the soul will be eventually
emptied into an impersonal river of thought or absorbed into the infinite
Life. (Cp. Schroedinger, "What is Life?") Others regard
the personality, after many "reincarnations", as perishable, but believe
that the individuality of the soul might remain as a memory
in the mind of God.

II. CRITICISM

The reading of the History of Philosophy gives the
impression that all avenues of thought have already been explored - and
in
vain. For every theory about the Mind has exhibited certain weaknesses:

1. The Greek concept of the Mind as a
spiritual substance has been rejected as useless because it does not successfully
show how such a substance can be anything but merely passive and devoid
of change, and thus not a proper subject of changing experiences such as
make an individual.

2. Christian and theosophic ideas are
classed with the mythologies - having no purely philosophical authority
but only a dogmatical or poetic appeal.

3. Cartesian postulate about a spiritual
substance vaguely identified with thought and a matter which was synonymous
with
extension, gave no hope for the discernment of any real connection
between the two. This lack of clarity about the essence of
Mind and about the constitution of Matter made any causal relation
of mind to matter inconceiveable. It therefore led to the
idea that mind and matter were merely two aspects of a
single unknown substance (Monism). This single substance was (by
Spinoza) identified with God. By others (Berkeley, etc.) matter
was regarded merely as a sensory appearance of mind
(Idealism). The third alternative was that of Materialism,
which regards mind as a mere "epiphenomenon" of matter. The
difficulty with the view of Spinoza is that it is merely a disguised
form of Pantheism; while Idealism leads to the logical quandary
of being able to admit the existence of no one else than oneself (Solipsism).

4. Materialistic and actualistic theories
unreasonably ask us to accept an explanation of mental states and processes,
and even personality itself, in terms of purely physical motion, which
seems incomprehensible to common sense. Behaviorism treats
thought and will as if they were products of the material body, like
the secretions of the glands.

5. Kantian thought and the personalistic
theories indeed grant the need of conceiving the experiences of a man as
united into a personality, but tells nothing of the underlying cause for
such a unification and nothing of the nature of the"Self".

III. THE SOLUTION OFFERED IN
THE WRITINGS

All the weaknesses of the foregoing systems are overcome,
and the philosophical objections met, in the concept presented in
the Writings of the New Church - a concept which involves a new revealed
knowledge of the soul and of spiritual substance.
The New Church doctrine, anticipated in part in
the course of Swedenborg's preparatory studies, clearly make possible the
following conclusions:

1. That man is primarily a spirit or
soul and that this soul with its mind is the subject which thinks and wills
and feels in the
material body which clothes it during life on earth.

2. That this spirit, although it has
no physical extension and is beyond the changes of nature, is not an abstraction
but is a finite spiritual substance and form: a substance which - as a
tool of the Divine creative power - impresses its form on the natural
substances of the body and actively directs the energy there available
to fashion and maintain organs for the use of the spirit.

Note: That man's soul is a spiritual substance implies
that it is not endowed with individual peremanence unless its states are
related, by natural birth, sensation, action and reaction, to the world
of space and time. (D Wis. viii.)

3. That this spirit is not changed by the
material forces of the body or influenced by sensory impulses, but adapts
itself in
correspondence to the forces and, recognizing in them uses for itself,
interprets all sensory changes into meanings.

4. That this spirit is unconsciously
an inhabitant of the spiritual world, and is influenced by the spirits
and angels there. The influx from the spiritual world is the origin of
all affections, feelings, and emotions, end gives the power of sensation
and will, thought and understanding.

5. That the spirit by degrees continually
forms
itself in accommodation to bodily experiences and sensations, retaining
their
meanings as 'memory', judging their values, selecting them and arranging
them according to laws of reason and according to
individual free choice; thus becoming a Mind within which states and
ideas and affections are built up into complex forms with
personal characteristics and reactions and a deliberately induced quality
that is imperishable and consciously personal to eternity
of after its seperation from the physical body.

6. That the spirit of man - to this end
- is now held in an equilibrium between heaven and hell.

7. That the influx of the spirit into the body
is conceivable because the spiritual is the cause of matter; since matter
originates
from and is maintained by a conatus to motion and cm be comprehended
only as a form of motion in space-time; and that
therefore the spiritual, as living conatus, can direct its formation
into organic forms of use which image, serve, and represent
spiritual ends.

8. That thus the spirit (Soul and mind)
is a substantial subject and a self-organizing force actuated by the life
proceeding from
God and receptive of love end wisdom from Him.

9. That this spirit retains i its complete
e human form end all its human faculties even after death.

APPENDIX I.
THE VARIOUS USAGES OF THE TERM "SOUL" IN THE WRITINGS OF EMANUEL
SWEDENBORG

In the De Infinito and the Psychologica, the "soul"
is described as the immortal organization of the first and second finites
of the Principia system. This entity, constructed of the finest things
of nature, would thus correspond to what the Theological Writings call
the "limbus" or "medium".

In the Economy of the Animal Kingdom, this sane entity,
produced from the first aura of nature, is called a "spirituous fluid",
This is often called the "soul" of the body, although it belongs to
dead nature and cannot be said to live, feel, or perceive.(1809)
Soul itself is however distinguished from this fluid as the spirit
which determines it from within.(1810)

In the work on the "Fibre" the Soul is further distinguished from the
spirituous fluid and said to be without parts, extension,
figure, or motion, simple and spiritual.(1811)

In the Rational Psychology and the Animal Kingdom
the Soul is distinguished from the puree: animal essence and is called
an
immaterial essence, purely spiritual in form and substance, and devoid
of extension or parts, yet having something analogous to
cotta, The Soul , thus defined, is shown to mean the entire after-death
spirit, whether `ether good or evil.(1812)

In the Worship and Love of God and later in the Word
Explained (Adversaria), the Soul is distinguished from the Mens and the
Animus, and called a supra-celestial faculty, purely spiritual in essence,(1813)
The term "souls" is used to distinguish human spirits from "minds which
rule human minds mediately", i.e., from spiritual forces in the abstract
which do no t possess an-;
"quasi-corporeal texture" (or 'limbus') such as men have after death.(1814)

In the Theological Writings we note the following
usages of the term "soul" and "souls":

a) The entire spirit of man which survives
after death.(1815)
b) A novitiate spirit. Especially those in
the "lower earth" are called souls, as distinguished from angels or devils.
c) The organic spirit or the interior man which
lives after death, as distinguished from the Divine influx info it, which
is then called "the internal man"(1816)
d) The first receptacle of life from the Lord;
the inmost which lacks a name(1817)and is above even
angelic consciousness. This is called the Soul and is called "a higher
spiritual substance" while the Mind is called a "lower spiritual substance".(1818)
e) Any degree of the human organic when regarded
inrespect to a lower degree into which it operates. Thus, relative to the
solid body tissues, the blood is called "the corporeal soul".(1819)